Abstract:

This paper
distinguishes two common fears about the posthuman and argues for the
importance of a concept of dignity that is inclusive enough to also apply to
many possible posthuman beings. Recognizing the possibility of posthuman
dignity undercuts an important objection against human enhancement and removes
a distortive double standard from our field of moral vision.

Transhumanists vs. Bioconservatives

Transhumanism
is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two
decades, and can be viewed as an outgrowth of secular humanism and the
Enlightenment. It holds that current human nature is improvable through the use
of applied science and other rational methods, which may make it possible to
increase human health-span, extend our intellectual and physical capacities,
and give us increased control over our own mental states and moods.[1]
Technologies of concern include not only current ones, like genetic engineering
and information technology, but also anticipated future developments such as
fully immersive virtual reality, machine-phase nanotechnology, and artificial
intelligence.

Transhumanists promote the view that
human enhancement technologies should be made widely available, and that
individuals should have broad discretion over which of these technologies to
apply to themselves (morphological freedom), and that parents should normally
get to decide which reproductive technologies to use when having children
(reproductive freedom).[2]
Transhumanists believe that, while there are hazards that need to be identified
and avoided, human enhancement technologies will offer enormous potential for
deeply valuable and humanly beneficial uses. Ultimately, it is possible that
such enhancements may make us, or our descendants, “posthuman,” beings who may
have indefinite health-spans, much greater intellectual faculties than any
current human being – and perhaps entirely new sensibilities or modalities – as
well as the ability to control their own emotions. The wisest approach
vis-à-vis these prospects, argue transhumanists, is to embrace technological
progress, while strongly defending human rights and individual choice, and
taking action specifically against concrete threats, such as military or
terrorist abuse of bioweapons, and against unwanted environmental or social
side-effects.

In opposition to this transhumanist
view stands a bioconservative camp that argues against the use of technology to
modify human nature. Prominent bioconservative writers include Leon Kass,
Francis Fukuyama, George Annas, Wesley Smith, Jeremy Rifkin, and Bill McKibben.
One of the central concerns of the bioconservatives is that human enhancement
technologies might be “dehumanizing.” The worry, which has been variously
expressed, is that these technologies might undermine our human dignity or
inadvertently erode something that is deeply valuable about being human but
that is difficult to put into words or to factor into a cost-benefit analysis.
In some cases (e.g., Leon Kass) the unease seems to derive from religious or
crypto-religious sentiments whereas for others (e.g., Francis Fukuyama) it
stems from secular grounds. The best approach, these bioconservatives argue, is
to implement global bans on swathes of promising human enhancement technologies
to forestall a slide down a slippery slope towards an ultimately debased
posthuman state.

While any brief description
necessarily skirts significant nuances that differentiate writers within the
two camps, I believe the above characterization nevertheless highlights a
principal fault line in one of the great debates of our times: how we should
look at the future of humankind and whether we should attempt to use technology
to make ourselves “more than human.” This paper will distinguish two common
fears about the posthuman and argue that they are partly unfounded and that, to
the extent that they correspond to real risks, there are better responses than
trying to implement broad bans on technology. I will make some remarks on the
concept of dignity, which bioconservatives believe to be imperiled by coming
human enhancement technologies, and suggest that we need to recognize that not
only humans in their current form, but posthumans too could have dignity.

Two Fears about the Posthuman

The
prospect of posthumanity is feared for at least two reasons. One is that the
state of being posthuman might in itself be degrading, so that by becoming
posthuman we might be harming ourselves. Another is that posthumans might pose
a threat to “ordinary” humans. (I shall set aside a third possible reason, that
the development of posthumans might offend some supernatural being.)

The
most prominent bioethicist to focus on the first fear is Leon Kass:

Most of the
given bestowals of nature have their given species-specified natures: they are
each and all of a given sort. Cockroaches and humans are equally
bestowed but differently natured. To turn a man into a cockroach—as we don’t
need Kafka to show us—would be dehumanizing. To try to turn a man into more
than a man might be so as well. We need more than generalized appreciation for
nature’s gifts. We need a particular regard and respect for the special gift
that is our own given nature[3]

Transhumanists counter that
nature’s gifts are sometimes poisoned and should not always be accepted.
Cancer, malaria, dementia, aging, starvation, unnecessary suffering, cognitive
shortcomings are all among the presents that we wisely refuse. Our own
species-specified natures are a rich source of much of the thoroughly
unrespectable and unacceptable – susceptibility for disease, murder, rape,
genocide, cheating, torture, racism. The horrors of nature in general and of
our own nature in particular are so well documented[4]
that it is astonishing that somebody as distinguished as Leon Kass should still
in this day and age be tempted to rely on the natural as a guide to what is
desirable or normatively right. We should be grateful that our ancestors were
not swept away by the Kassian sentiment, or we would still be picking lice off
each other’s backs. Rather than deferring to the natural order, transhumanists
maintain that we can legitimately reform ourselves and our natures in
accordance with humane values and personal aspirations.

If
one rejects nature as a general criterion of the good, as most thoughtful
people nowadays do, one can of course still acknowledge that particular ways of
modifying human nature would be debasing. Not all change is progress. Not even
all well-intended technological intervention in human nature would be on
balance beneficial. Kass goes far beyond these truisms however when he declares
that utter dehumanization lies in store for us as the inevitable result of our
obtaining technical mastery over our own nature:

The final
technical conquest of his own nature would almost certainly leave mankind
utterly enfeebled. This form of mastery would be identical with utter
dehumanization. Read Huxley’s Brave New World, read C. S. Lewis’s Abolition
of Man, read Nietzsche’s account of the last man, and then read the
newspapers. Homogenization, mediocrity, pacification, drug-induced contentment,
debasement of taste, souls without loves and longings – these are the
inevitable results of making the essence of human nature the last project of
technical mastery. In his moment of triumph, Promethean man will become a
contented cow.[5]

The fictional
inhabitants of Brave New World, to pick the best-known of Kass’s
examples, are admittedly short on dignity (in at least one sense of the word).
But the claim that this is the inevitable consequence of our obtaining
technological mastery over human nature is exceedingly pessimistic – and
unsupported – if understood as a futuristic prediction, and false if construed
as a claim about metaphysical necessity.

There are many things wrong with the
fictional society that Huxley described. It is static, totalitarian, caste-bound;
its culture is a wasteland. The brave new worlders themselves are a dehumanized
and undignified lot. Yet posthumans they are not. Their capacities are not
super-human but in many respects substantially inferior to our own. Their life
expectancy and physique are quite normal, but their intellectual, emotional,
moral, and spiritual faculties are stunted. The majority of the brave new
worlders have various degrees of engineered mental retardation. And everyone,
save the ten world controllers (along with a miscellany of primitives and
social outcasts who are confined to fenced preservations or isolated islands),
are barred or discouraged from developing individuality, independent thinking
and initiative, and are conditioned not to desire these traits in the first
place. Brave New World is not a tale of human enhancement gone amok but
a tragedy of technology and social engineering being used to deliberately
cripple moral and intellectual capacities – the exact antithesis of the
transhumanist proposal.

Transhumanists
argue that the best way to avoid a Brave New World is by vigorously defending
morphological and reproductive freedoms against any would-be world controllers.
History has shown the dangers in letting governments curtail these freedoms.
The last century’s government-sponsored coercive eugenics programs, once
favored by both the left and the right, have been thoroughly discredited.
Because people are likely to differ profoundly in their attitudes towards human
enhancement technologies, it is crucial that no one solution be imposed on
everyone from above but that individuals get to consult their own consciences
as to what is right for themselves and their families. Information, public
debate, and education are the appropriate means by which to encourage others to
make wise choices, not a global ban on a broad range of potentially beneficial
medical and other enhancement options.

The second fear
is that there might be an eruption of violence between unaugmented humans and
posthumans. George Annas, Lori Andrews, and Rosario Isasi have argued that we
should view human cloning and all inheritable genetic modifications as “crimes
against humanity” in order to reduce the probability that posthuman species
will arise, on grounds that such a species would pose an existential threat to
the old human species:

The new species, or
“posthuman,” will likely view the old “normal” humans as inferior, even
savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter. The normals, on the other hand, may
see the posthumans as a threat and if they can, may engage in a preemptive
strike by killing the posthumans before they themselves are killed or enslaved
by them. It is ultimately this predictable potential for genocide that makes
species-altering experiments potential weapons of mass destruction, and makes
the unaccountable genetic engineer a potential bioterrorist.[6]

There is no
denying that bioterrorism and unaccountable genetic engineers developing
increasingly potent weapons of mass destruction pose a serious threat to our
civilization. But using the rhetoric of bioterrorism and weapons of mass
destruction to cast aspersions on therapeutic uses of biotechnology to improve
health, longevity, and other human capacities is unhelpful. The issues are
quite distinct. Reasonable people can be in favor of strict regulation of
bioweapons while promoting beneficial medical uses of genetics and other human
enhancement technologies, including inheritable and “species-altering”
modifications.

Human society is
always at risk of some group deciding to view another group of humans as fit
for slavery or slaughter. To counteract such tendencies, modern societies have
created laws and institutions, and endowed them with powers of enforcement,
that act to prevent groups of citizens from enslaving or slaughtering one
another. The efficacy of these institutions does not depend on all citizens
having equal capacities. Modern, peaceful societies can have large numbers of
people with diminished physical or mental capacities along with many other
people who may be exceptionally physically strong or healthy or intellectually
talented in various ways. Adding people with technologically enhanced
capacities to this already broad distribution of ability would not need to rip
society apart or trigger genocide or enslavement.

The assumption
that inheritable genetic modifications or other human enhancement technologies
would lead to two distinct and separate species should also be questioned. It
seems much more likely that there would be a continuum of differently modified
or enhanced individuals, which would overlap with the continuum of as-yet
unenhanced humans. The scenario in which “the enhanced” form a pact and then
attack “the naturals” makes for exciting science fiction but is not necessarily
the most plausible outcome. Even today, the segment containing the tallest
ninety percent of the population could, in principle, get together and kill or
enslave the shorter decile. That this does not happen suggests that a
well-organized society can hold together, even if it contains many possible
coalitions of people sharing some attribute such that, if they ganged up, they
would be capable of exterminating the rest.

To note that the
extreme case of a war between humans and posthumans is not the most likely
scenario is not to say that there are no legitimate social concerns about the
steps that may take us closer to posthumanity. Inequity, discrimination, and
stigmatization – against, or on behalf of, modified people – could become
serious issues. Transhumanists would argue that these (potential) social
problems call for social remedies. One example of how contemporary technology
can change important aspects of someone’s identity is sex reassignment. The
experiences of transsexuals show that Western culture still has work to do in becoming
more accepting of diversity. This is a task that we can begin to tackle today
by fostering a climate of tolerance and acceptance towards those who are
different from ourselves. Painting alarmist pictures of the threat from future
technologically-modified people, or hurling preemptive condemnations of their
necessarily debased nature, is not the best way to go about it.

What about the
hypothetical case in which someone intends to create, or turn themselves into,
a being of so radically enhanced capacities that a single one or a small group
of such individuals would be capable of taking over the planet? This is clearly
not a situation that is likely to arise in the imminent future, but one can
imagine that, perhaps in a few decades, the prospective creation of
superintelligent machines could raise this kind of concern. The would-be
creator of a new life form with such surpassing capabilities would have an
obligation to ensure that the proposed being is free from psychopathic
tendencies and, more generally, that it has humane inclinations. For example, a
future artificial-intelligence programmer should be required to make a strong
case that launching a purportedly human-friendly superintelligence would be
safer than the alternative. Again, however, this (currently) science-fiction
scenario must be clearly distinguished from our present situation and our more
immediate concern with taking effective steps towards incrementally improving
human capacities and health-span.

Is Human Dignity Incompatible with Posthuman Dignity?

Human dignity
is sometimes invoked as a polemical substitute for clear ideas. This is not to
say that there are no important moral issues relating to dignity, but it does
mean that there is a need to define what one has in mind when one uses the
term. Here, we shall consider two different senses of dignity:

Dignity as moral status, in particular the
inalienable right to be treated with a basic level of respect.

Dignity as the quality of being worthy or honorable;
worthiness, worth, nobleness, excellence. (The Oxford English Dictionary)[7]

On both these
definitions, dignity is something that a posthuman could possess. Francis
Fukuyama, however, seems to deny this and warns that giving up on the idea that
dignity is unique to human beings – defined as those possessing a mysterious
essential human quality he calls “Factor X”[8]
– would invite disaster:

Denial
of the concept of human dignity – that is, of the idea that there is something
unique about the human race that entitles every member of the species to a
higher moral status than the rest of the natural world – leads us down a very
perilous path. We may be compelled ultimately to take this path, but we should
do so only with our eyes open. Nietzsche is a much better guide to what lies
down that road than the legions of bioethicists and casual academic Darwinians
that today are prone to give us moral advice on this subject.[9]

What
appears to worry Fukuyama is that introducing new kinds of enhanced persons
into the world might cause some individuals (perhaps infants, or the mentally
handicapped, or unenhanced humans in general) to lose some of the moral status
that they currently possess, and that a fundamental precondition of liberal
democracy, the principle of equal dignity for all, would be destroyed.

The
underlying intuition seems to be that instead of the famed “expanding moral
circle,” what we have is more like an oval, whose shape we can change but whose
area must remain constant. Thankfully, this purported conservation law of moral
recognition lacks empirical support. The set of individuals accorded full moral
status by Western societies has actually increased, to include men without
property or noble decent, women, and non-white peoples. It would seem feasible
to extend this set further to include future posthumans, or, for that matter,
some of the higher primates or human-animal chimeras, should such be created –
and to do so without causing any compensating shrinkage in another direction.
(The moral status of problematic borderline cases, such as fetuses or
late-stage Alzheimer patients, or the brain dead, should perhaps be decided
separately from the issue of technologically modified humans or novel
artificial life forms.) Our own role in this process need not be that of
passive bystanders. We can work to create more inclusive social structures that
accord appropriate moral recognition and legal rights to all who need them, be
they male or female, black or white, flesh or silicon.

Dignity
in the second sense, as referring to a special excellence or moral worthiness,
is something that current human beings possess to widely differing degrees.
Some excel far more than others do. Some are morally admirable; others are base
and vicious. There is no reason for supposing that posthuman beings could not
also have dignity in this second sense. They may even be able to attain higher
levels of moral and other excellence than any of us humans. The fictional brave
new worlders, who were subhuman rather than posthuman, would have scored low on
this kind of dignity, and partly for that reason they would be awful role
models for us to emulate. But surely we can create more uplifting and appealing
visions of what we may aspire to become. There may be some who would transform
themselves into degraded posthumans – but then some people today do not live
very worthy human lives. This is regrettable, but the fact that some people
make bad choices is not generally a sufficient ground for rescinding people’s
right to choose. And legitimate countermeasures are available: education,
encouragement, persuasion, social, and cultural reform. These, not a blanket
prohibition of all posthuman ways of being, are the measures to which those
bothered by the prospect of debased posthumans should resort. A liberal
democracy should normally permit incursions into morphological and reproductive
freedoms only in cases where somebody is abusing these freedoms to harm another
person.

The
principle that parents should have broad discretion to decide on genetic
enhancements for their children has been attacked on grounds that this form of
reproductive freedom would constitute a kind of parental tyranny that would
undermine the child’s dignity and capacity for autonomous choice; for instance,
by Hans Jonas:

Technological
mastered nature now again includes man who (up to now) had, in technology, set
himself against it as its master… But whose power is this – and over whom or
over what? Obviously the power of those living today over those coming after
them, who will be the defenseless other side of prior choices made by the
planners of today. The other side of the power of today is the future bondage
of the living to the dead.[10]

Jonas
is relying on the assumption that our descendants, who will presumably be far
more technologically advanced than we are, would nevertheless be defenseless
against our machinations to expand their capacities. This is almost certainly
incorrect. If, for some inscrutable reason, they decided that they would prefer
to be less intelligent, less healthy, and lead shorter lives, they would not
lack the means to achieve these objectives and frustrate our designs.

In
any case, if the alternative to parental choice in determining the basic
capacities of new people is entrusting the child’s welfare to nature, that is,
blind chance, then the decision should be easy. Had Mother Nature been a real
parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder. And
transhumanists can accept, of course, that just as society may in exceptional
circumstances override parental autonomy, such as in cases of neglect or abuse,
so too may society impose regulations to protect the child-to-be from genuinely
harmful genetic interventions – but not because they represent choice rather
than chance.

Jürgen
Habermas, in a recent work, echoes Jonas’ concern and worries that even the
mere knowledge of having been intentionally made by another could have
ruinous consequences:

We
cannot rule out that knowledge of one’s own hereditary features as programmed
may prove to restrict the choice of an individual’s life, and to undermine the
essentially symmetrical relations between free and equal human beings.[11]

A
transhumanist could reply that it would be a mistake for an individual to
believe that she has no choice over her own life just because some (or all) of
her genes were selected by her parents. She would, in fact, have as much choice
as if her genetic constitution had been selected by chance. It could even be
that she would enjoy significantly more choice and autonomy in her life,
if the modifications were such as to expand her basic capability set. Being
healthy, smarter, having a wide range of talents, or possessing greater powers
of self-control are blessings that tend to open more life paths than they
block.

Even
if there were a possibility that some genetically modified individuals might
fail to grasp these points and thus might feel oppressed by their knowledge of
their origin, that would be a risk to be weighed against the risks incurred by
having an unmodified genome, risks that can be extremely grave. If safe and
effective alternatives were available, it would be irresponsible to risk
starting someone off in life with the misfortune of congenitally diminished
basic capacities or an elevated susceptibility to disease.

Why We Need Posthuman Dignity

Similarly
ominous forecasts were made in the seventies about the severe psychological
damage that children conceived through in vitro fertilization would
suffer upon learning that they originated from a test tube – a prediction that
turned out to be entirely false. It is hard to avoid the impression that some
bias or philosophical prejudice is responsible for the readiness with which
many bioconservatives seize on even the flimsiest of empirical justifications
for banning human enhancement technologies of certain types but not others.
Suppose it turned out that playing Mozart to pregnant mothers improved the
child’s subsequent musical talent. Nobody would argue for a ban on
Mozart-in-the-womb on grounds that we cannot rule out that some psychological
woe might befall the child once she discovers that her facility with the violin
had been prenatally “programmed” by her parents. Yet, when it comes to, e.g.,
genetic enhancements, arguments that are not so very different from this parody
are often put forward as weighty if not conclusive objections by eminent
bioconservative writers. To transhumanists, this looks like doublethink. How
can it be that to bioconservatives almost any anticipated downside, predicted
perhaps on the basis of the shakiest pop-psychological theory, so readily
achieves that status of deep philosophical insight and knockdown objection
against the transhumanist project?

Perhaps
a part of the answer can be found in the different attitudes that
transhumanists and bioconservatives have towards posthuman dignity.
Bioconservatives tend to deny posthuman dignity and view posthumanity as a
threat to human dignity. They are therefore tempted to look for ways to
denigrate interventions that are thought to be pointing in the direction of more
radical future modifications that may eventually lead to the emergence of those
detestable posthumans. But unless this fundamental opposition to the posthuman
is openly declared as a premiss of their argument, this then forces them to use
a double standard of assessment whenever particular cases are considered in
isolation: for example, one standard for germ-line genetic interventions and
another for improvements in maternal nutrition (an intervention presumably not
seen as heralding a posthuman era).

Transhumanists,
by contrast, see human and posthuman dignity as compatible and complementary.
They insist that dignity, in its modern sense, consists in what we are and what
we have the potential to become, not in our pedigree or our causal origin. What
we are is not a function solely of our DNA but also of our technological and
social context. Human nature in this broader sense is dynamic, partially
human-made, and improvable. Our current extended phenotypes (and the lives that
we lead) are markedly different from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We
read and write; we wear clothes; we live in cities; we earn money and buy food
from the supermarket; we call people on the telephone, watch television, read
newspapers, drive cars, file taxes, vote in national elections; women give
birth in hospitals; life-expectancy is three times longer than in the
Pleistocene Era; we know that the Earth is round and that stars are large
clouds of gas lit from within by nuclear fusion, and that the universe is
approximately 13.6 billion years old and enormously large. In the eyes of a
hunter-gatherer, we might already appear “posthuman.” Yet these radical
extensions of human capabilities – some of them biological, others external –
have not divested us of moral status or dehumanized us in the sense of making
us generally unworthy and base. Similarly, should we or our descendants one day
succeed in becoming what relative to current standards we may refer to as
posthuman, this need not entail a loss dignity either.

From
the transhumanist standpoint, there is no need to behave as if there were a
deep moral difference between technological and other means of enhancing human
lives. By defending posthuman dignity we promote a more inclusive and humane
ethics, one that will embrace future technologically-modified people as well as
humans of the contemporary kind. We also remove a distortive double standard
from the field of our moral vision, allowing us to perceive more clearly the
opportunities that exist for further human progress.[12]

[12] For their
comments I am grateful to Heather Bradshaw, John Brooke, Aubrey de Grey, Robin
Hanson, Matthew Liao, Julian Savulescu, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Zangwill, and
to the audiences at the Ian Ramsey Center seminar of June 6th in Oxford, the
Transvision 2003 conference at Yale, and the 2003 European Science Foundation
Workshop on Science and Human Values, where earlier versions of this paper were
presented, and to two anonymous referees.